1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a method of determining the angle of orientation of an object in an image.
2. Description of the Related Technology
It is frequently desirable to estimate the angle or orientation of an object in an image or video sequence with respect to the camera. For example, the ability of a robotic hand to grasp a three-dimensional object accurately depends on its ability to estimate the relative orientation of that object.
Various methods for determining the orientation angle of an object are known in the art. For example, these methods may extract a sparse representation of an object as a collection of features such as edges and corners, and then analyze the relative orientation of these features to determine an overall orientation angle for the object. However, these techniques are often not robust to variations in object shape and topography, or to variations in image quality such as noise and non-uniform illumination.